This picture was taken with my very first digital camera, an old and grainy Casio QV-100, in 1997. Half my life ago, almost to the day. It needed special drivers from two 3.5-inch floppy disks to get connected to my Windows 95, on my brand new Pentium. It was transmitted over a RS232 serial cable, via it’s own Casio GUI, over a 9800 baud rate, odd parity bit.

Since then it has survived copies to just a couple of floppy disks, CDs, a multitude of SCSI hard drives, DVDs, it was bused through USB cables to external hard drives that flew from Greece to Japan and back, and to the East and the West of the North American coasts, going from Dells to HP’s to Compaqs (before they were HPs) to Macs and finally found it’s way to London, on a new SeaGate, 500 GB now, 1000 times larger than the hard drive it started on, in the fresh but exactly same magnetic state.

One of the people on this picture is dead, and he was my friend. His name was Thodoris Frantzis.

This is the only picture I have of him and it has never been published before, or shown to more than just a couple of people. It is now on the safe haven of the wordpress servers and the not so a-temporal caches of your personal computers, mobile phones, tablets. If you drag and drop it, swipe it, slide it, right-click and save-as it, it will stay there on your machine for a bit longer, maybe for another 15 years.

People die twice; once when their body stops working, and once again when we see a picture of them and can’t remember their name.